Lets get Technical: Coding
Navigating websites and internet browsers may come easy to the user, but there is a lot of behind the scene details that go into making using websites a memorable experience. Enter, Coding. Coding is the backbone to a websites visuals and navigation, and having a superior code for your website can put you ahead of your competitors.
Why Learn Coding?
Coding may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you develop a marketing plan or campaign. But when marketers know how to do simple and basic codes, it can speed up the entire process of your overall plan. By learning how to code and how to code effectively, the marketer is able to get a lot more of the work done themselves, without having to rely on other members of their team. This may sound like a selfish approach, but if one person can notice the problem and fix it, it doesn't waste the developers time teaching the marketer how to code, and the work can continue with little time wasted and little disruption.
Where to Start
Coding is a lot. It is a lot of very specific information that has to be done the right way to get the results that you desire. That being said there are some great platforms out there to help you learn and understand how to code.
Codeacademy is a great place for first time coders to go in and learn the basics of how to code. By creating a free account I was bale to learn some of the basics about HTML and CSS coding. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to change the layout of your website. Wether that be through font type, color, size or visual.
By creating CSS codes that can change the visual of your website, it is important to remember to properly link the codes together. By using the relative path, you can easily link your CSS code onto your HTML stylesheet.
For each link created, you need to include the href, types, and rel. an example of a completed link is shown below starting on line six.
Once comfortable creating different CSS files and saving them separately from your HTML code, one is able stack different classes onto each other, rather then coding everything specifically for each new style.
For example, on the left you can see the different codes I have created, and saved into my style.css file. By saving them here, I am able to open the code for index.html and link these codes to the ones on the websites HTML.
By linking the codes from my style.css file, I am able to combine and create the perfect visual for my HTML website quickly and easily. Line eleven, pictured below, shows two of the combined codes to create the uppercase title on the page to the right.
Squarespace and Wordpress
Whereas Codeacademy teaches you how to write and understand your code. Platforms like Squarespace and Wordpress allow for an easy set up and website design. Both websites offer the user interesting themes, different font styles, and overall a unique way to build your website. One thing I particularly liked about Squarespace, was the background detail on why you want to create a website.
For my fake food website I used to test it out, showed me what type of website would be best for me, and the best templates I could use to make the most appealing website.
Wordpress was also relatively easy to set up, and offered a really nice navigation bar where I could locate areas of my website that I would like to analyze. Go down far enough and you can enter the customization tab where you can go in and edit your websites CSS.
Wrap Up
Overall, understanding how to code will benefit the marketer. It is a valuable attribute to know how to code and can benefit the timeliness of your project when done correctly. Sites like Codeacademy are great ways to learn how to code, I spent almost 2.5 hours on the site and the amount of information I read was great and I cannot wait to continue the studying courses. Wordpress and Squarespace are also great ways to start a website and easily navigate how to edit and control the users view. Although it may be a lot, learning code is important for every marketer to understand!
